The blue in the Brazilian flag represents the sky, accompanied by stars that mark each state of this country. The green symbolizes our vegetation, this land where its people of flesh and bone reside. This green also represents the forests where mythological beings lurk, waiting. These sacred spaces uphold figures of devotion, spaces that invigorate belief. This cultural system—plural, complex, syncretic, mixed, and diffuse—is also a way to give form to the imagination of our people: a population forged in Portuguese colonial enterprise, the product of various migrations, but also of the violent enslavement of various indigenous nations who lived here and African populations, of diverse origins, brought forcibly.

Between the sky and the earth, quite freely, it embraces fact and fiction in the quest to make this system even more complex. Starting from pictorial representations of deities and beasts, mythological beings, and fantastic figures, we find not only religious or mystical beliefs: we realize that the idea of “a Brazilian people” also depends on our belief to persist. Born of plural and violent miscegenation, this idea called “Brazil” continues to echo prejudices and truths propagated over more than five centuries of existence. In this sense, we understand here, from the rich imagination of the popular artists preserved by the collection of the International Museum of Naïve Art of Brazil, paradigms that challenge the very term naïf—French for naïve—that names the museum: the cults here are many and varied, from Ogum to Christ, from the Werewolf to Santa Claus, from religious rituals marking the passage of the years to the worship of images in museums. Yes, the very idea of a museum is questioned here—are only the paintings and images collected by cultural institutions important? Have our stigmas about the value of certain images brutally relegated artists to silence and forgetfulness?

Between the Sky and the Earth sought a rich and diverse repertoire that invites the public to question their own beliefs: in art, in the country, in religions, and in political doctrines. Not only artworks or sanctities are adored and worshiped. The popular, here, deliberately meets the mass: from large pilgrimages to mass media, the great cults are linked to television program images, spectacle culture, and entertainment.

It is important to question our truths and recognize them in their fragilities, to value culture for what it is: a formless mass, in ongoing transformation, that is shaped in our discourses and images. The root of the term “culture” is close to the idea of cultivation, of what is cared for. If, for a long time, we have been led to believe that some manifestations are more important, special, or sophisticated than others, here we will understand how there is a technological richness in practices that still need to be discussed and widely valued. Between the sky and the earth, “There is no sin south of the Equator,” “Everything is divine and marvelous!” and "God is Brazilian!" but the Devil is too. Through these images, we can perceive that the desire to be together, united in our freedom of belief, is a gigantic value. From the sacred to the profane, from what we are certain of to what remains a mystery.